Increasing the affairs of individuals and enterprises are being conducted in an automated manner over the Internet. Enterprises now engage in selling their products and services over the Internet; individuals also engage in communicating with one another over the Internet; employees may also engage in accessing secure resources of their employers over the Internet, etc.
One ever present and daunting issue with this activity is Internet security. Some transactions may be innocuous and may not require any substantial security. However, a growing number of transactions do involve sensitive material associated with enterprises and individuals, such as corporate secrets, personal data, etc. A variety of security mechanisms exist to address this issue.
For example, some enterprises may install dedicated connections for secure communications between parties. Yet, this approach is less pervasive with the advent of Virtual Private Network (VPN) techniques. A VPN permits an insecure connection to be used to achieve secure communications between parties engaged in a transaction.
VPN transactions use authentication and encryption techniques for purposes of ensuring that communications are secure. Essentially, a VPN permits insecure communications lines to be used in a secure manner.
Yet, installation of VPN services on devices of a network is generally not a straightforward and easy procedure for network administrators. Each device must be visited and manually attended to for purposes of installing and configuring VPN capabilities. An enterprise with thousands of employees and devices will generally require that a network administrator or that a team of administrators manually visit or remotely attend to each device of the enterprise for purposes of properly installing and configuring software that supports a desired VPN solution. This is obviously time consuming and a substantial deployment issue for the enterprise to consider before embarking on an enterprise-wide VPN-based solution.
In some cases, the enterprise may only want a limited VPN solution with limited VPN capabilities, such that the VPN services can be provided in pre-delivered and pre-configured services that exist on the devices. However, to know in advance when limited VPN services is going to be appropriate and when full VPN services are needed is almost impossible to foresee and will almost certainly change for each user of the network at some point in time.
Consequently, there is a need for improved techniques for delivering and configuring VPN access.